GreyOrange to expand into Middle East markets

Robotics and warehouse automation startup GreyOrange is expanding its operations into the Middle East market. The startup, which was founded in 2011 currently has operations India, China, Honk Kong and Japan. With the Middle East expansion, the company will cater to retail, consumer and packaged goods, and e-commerce companies by offering logistics automation solutions like inventory management, order profiling and sorting, etc.

In August last year, the company raised $30 million in a round of funding from Tiger Global, Blume Ventures and others for enhancing R&D operations as well as to expand to Asia Pacific, Middle East and Europe. At that time, GreyOrange said it catered to Flipkart, Kerry Logistics, Jabong, DTDC, Aramex, Amazon.in, Gojavas and Mahindra as its clients. It also claimed to manage over 3 million packages per day.

The company also raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the same investors and angel investors like Alok Rawat and Dileep Nath in April 2014. Prior to this, Grey Orange Robotics had secured investment from Blume Ventures, BITS Sparks Angels and other International Angels in March 2013.

Products: GreyOrange Robotics builds worker robots and assisting systems for warehouse automation. It currently has two products – Butler and Sorter.

Butler, the company’s flagship product, is a material handling system comprising small robots that traverse on a grid of paths across the warehouse floor to fetch racks of items to the packer. The robot also lets companies optimize their warehouse arrangement by dynamically resorting storage racks depending on order data.

On the other hand, the Sorter is an automated sorting, scanning and weighing system, which sorts and diverts packets to the designated delivery vendors. The company claims that its sorter can scan and sort parcels of all types and sizes at an average speed of 1,500, 3,000 or 6,000 parcels per hour. Other than this, the Sorter can also measure and weigh parcels and sort irregularly shaped parcels.